Watch stunning video from a Nashville stop on Dylan's unfairly maligned 1978 world tour.
Bob Dylan's 1978 world tour is widely derided as one of the lowest moments in the songwriter's long career, a soulless, 114-date greatest-hits revue with a bloated 11-piece band that seemed borrowed from Neil Diamond or the recently deceased Elvis Presley. Critics dubbed it the “Alimony Tour” as it followed his nasty (and expensive) divorce from his wife Sara, and many fans saw it as a shocking retreat from the brilliance of the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue.
The tour's perception was forever shaped by Bob Dylan on Budokan, a quickie live album recorded just days after the year-long odyssey began. Originally released exclusively in Japan, the set was released worldwide after fans began importing it. In hindsight, releasing the album anywhere was probably a mistake, as it captured the tour in its early stages, long before the band got together and Street Legal's songs made their way onto the set.
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When the tour finally came to America in September, the show had improved significantly, although some of the new arrangements included old favorites like “Mr. “Tambourine Man” and “Blowin' in the Wind” never quite came together. The best moments of the evening came when they presented material from Street Legal. It's an album full of horns and backing singers and it was perfect for this band.
The highlight of the show regularly came at the very end, when the band launched into “Changing of the Guards,” the first song from Street Legal. It's a seven-minute epic with some of the most confusing lyrics in Dylan's catalog, and every night he delivers them all with fiery passion. Here's a video from a stop in Nashville at the very end of the tour. (There's no sound for the first ten seconds.) It's absolutely sensational, and in typical Dylan fashion, he hasn't sung a note of the song since the last show of the tour.
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